With the development of the Internet, network applications such as web-based applications have evolved in size and capability. With evolvement of the applications, the data that the applications generate and manage has grown as well. Application management systems are used to monitor applications that implement much of the functionality of a network system and web-based service. These application management systems retrieve and manage a large quantity of application management data.
Application management data is interrelated and may contain many hierarchies of data. For example, application management data may include hierarchies of applications, transactions, subsystems, resources used by an application, and other hierarchies. These hierarchies are interrelated through communication, logically, physically, or in some other manner. For example, a “purchase merchandise” transaction may use a credit card processing subsystem which uses resources such as CPU, disk space, etc. These elements are all interrelated.
Typically, systems for displaying application monitoring data for a monitored application provide a structured path of information for a particular type of element. For example, information for a hierarchy of data may be provided in a manner which provides a structured path of application data. In order to view another type of data or reverse relationships between data elements, a user must view an entirely different hierarchy of data or is simply unable to view the desired relationship. For example, a user may view a single hierarchy of application methods used by an application and resources used by the application, but cannot view the methods that call the subsystems from the point of view of the subsystem through the same hierarchy. Thus, different types of interrelated application data are often handled as different sets of data or not provided at all. Further, it is difficult to determine the relationships between the different types of application monitoring data when the data is viewed in separate hierarchies.